The present invention relates, in general, to web services and, in particular, to identifying compatible web service policies between web services and web service clients.
For a web service client to utilize a service provided by a web service, security that is supported by each of these entities may be required to be implemented. The web service may transmit a web service policy document identifying one or more web service policies supported by the web service (these web service policies are referred to as “service policies”). The web service client also has web service policies that it supports (these web service policies are referred to as “client policies”). In order for the web service client and the web service to interact, web service policies at the web service and web service client can be implemented that are compatible with each other. To do this, an analysis may be conducted to identify compatible client policies and service policies.
Such analysis may be time-consuming and computationally expensive. For instance, a user may need to wait while a computationally demanding algorithm (e.g., a WS-Policy Normalization and Intersection algorithm) is performed to identify compatible client policies and service policies.